Many industries consume large volumes of fluids (predominately water), chemical additives and reagents in manufacturing products. The fluids are used primarily in rinsing, cooling and treatment operations to achieve desired product quality and cleanliness. In industry, manufactured products are often immersion rinsed and/or sprayed several times along an assembly line via immersion tanks and/or high-pressure spray washer conveyors. Excess solid debris loosely adhering to newly manufactured or remanufactured products is washed off in rinsing/spraying processes and accumulates in short order in reservoirs of immersion and spray waters, which degrades the cleansing ability of the fluid, leaving it ineffective in achieving desired product quality. Depending on the manufacturing process, the entire volume (typically between 400 to 2000 gal.) of fluid in an immersion tank or recirculant spray washer conveyor may be discharged daily to waste and refreshed with new fluid and chemical additive to restore effective cleansing ability. A significant cost burden is associated with up-front purchasing, inventorying and administration in re-supplying fresh fluids and additives, which is furthered in properly treating (physically, chemically & biologically) used fluids before discharging to the environment for natural recycling. Therefore, both business and environmental perspectives share a common desire, which is to significantly reduce the rate at which fluids are consumed in manufacturing processes.
At present, conventional approaches to solving and/or mitigating the aforementioned problem are fraught with inefficiencies that include: 1) high initial capital equipment cost; 2) difficulty in installation and mobilization of equipment; 3) difficulty in understanding and controlling operation; 4) requirements for formal training to operate and maintain; 5) difficulty in troubleshooting; 6) high frequency wear parts and many moving parts; 7) requirements for specialty tools in operating and maintaining; 8) large, heavy and extensive (large footprint); 9) high incremental cost in replacing consumable filtration media; 10) strict physical property requirements of accumulating solids in specific gravity, size, shape, consistency and character; 11) high associated maintenance time and cost; 12) pressure- and flow-sensitive; 13) limited scope by relying largely on a single principal of operation; 14) low efficiency; 15) undesirable interruption of main process when maintaining; 16) frequent and voluminous discharge and flush volumes required during automatic cleaning cycles; 17) largely non-automatic in cleaning internal elements; 18) high associated energy cost; 19) difficulty in accessing and maintaining internal elements; 20) frequent malfunction; 21) frequent obstruction of critical elements; 22) auxiliary power requirements and controls in initiating auto-cleaning modes; 23) sharing of filtration equipment between reservoir tanks is prohibitive due to conventional design mindset around a necessarily permanent configuration; 24) filtration equipment typically does not come fully packaged, requiring integration of ancillary equipment, controls and instrumentation; 25) replacement of internal elements in determining ideal media pore sizes is expensive and time-consuming; 26) units are easily tampered with; 27) high shipping and handling costs on weight and volume basis; 28) degree of influence in removing solids from fluids is not appreciable (rate of fluid contamination is appreciably greater than rate of solids removal); 29) disassembly is time-consuming, difficult and potentially unsafe; 30) low return on investment translating into long payback periods; 31) operational results selfishly favoring either business perspective or environmental perspective; and 32) that problem is not truly solved, rather, it is transferred.